


For your eyes only

by jspringsteen



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M, Other Easy guys will show up eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-06-04 11:53:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6656788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jspringsteen/pseuds/jspringsteen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Joe sees Webster after his death is in the back of his cab.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Whew! This has been a long time in the making--and will be a longer time still to finish, I'm afraid. This is the first time I'm trying my hand at a proper fic with chapters and everything. I can't promise anything about my update schedule, but I've written a large part of this fic already, so the next chapter should be finished quite soon. Please enjoy! *cue "Unchained Melody"*

_Man is the World, and death th'Ocean,_  
 _To which God gives the lower parts of man._  
 _This Sea environs all, and though as yet_  
 _God hath set marks, and bounds, twixt us and it,_  
 _Yet doth it roar, and gnaw, and still pretend,_  
 _And breaks our banks, when ere it takes a friend._  
  
-John Donne – “Elegie on the Lady Marckham”  
  
* * *

_November 1961_

The clock on the dashboard showed 6:02 in algae-green digits as Joe sat down behind the wheel on the threadbare grey seat which he'd attempted to dress up for the customers by covering it with a knitted, colourful throw, which he'd picked up at the thrift store for a penny. Luckily, the washing machine that a month of extra shifts had paid for had been able to get rid of nearly all the bloodstains. Joe took good care of his cab; he swept it out and drove it through the car wash every day after work, and he picked the air fresheners that dangled from his rear view mirror with care. As for himself, he shaved regularly and cut his own hair, happy that his thick brown locks tumbled over his forehead in a careless way. This morning the sky was a streaky white, like ground paint on a wooden fence, and the air hummed with the sounds of morning traffic. Joe clipped on his seat belt and adjusted the side mirrors, whistling Gershwin's 'Someone to Watch Over Me' (badly), already dreaming of that first hot cup of coffee he usually allowed himself at 9 AM. When he reached up to adjust the rear view mirror he looked into the blue eyes of PFC David K. Webster, Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and screamed.

Had he been driving, it would have taken a lot of double shifts to pay for the damage of the inevitably traffic collision. His heart pounding as if trying to hammer its way out of his chest,  Joe rubbed his eyes and stared hard at the mirror, which unapologetically showed an empty backseat and a smear of San Francisco skyline on the dusty brown canvas of the rear window. When nothing appeared in the mirror for the next ten seconds, he blew out his cheeks and relaxed a little. He reached up and angled the mirror to look at his own reflection, though he already knew what he would see: dark eyes marbled with tiny veins from a lack of sleep; purple half-moons under his eyes that seemed to be there permanently; cheeks, sunken and already sagging a little; teeth stained with nicotine. He recalled, pulling out the memory like an often-thumbed photograph, his scrawny young self, smart in his dress greens and leaning on Johnny Martin's shoulder, shmoozing with some English girls while on leave in Aldbourne. They had gazed at him as if he was Gregory Peck. For they were Yanks; loved by many, despised by many, but undoubtedly kings of the world for a couple of months. They were going to sock old Adolf one on the jaw. They were going to finish the job.

He looked over his shoulder at the empty backseat. Not completely empty, after all—there was a scrap of paper on the seat behind him. Joe reached for it and folded it open. Song lyrics, at a glance; probably fallen out of the pocket of the guitarist he'd driven to the Fillmore District yesterday. He hadn't had time to sweep out his cab, having spent too much time loitering in the cafeteria with his colleague, Phil, after hours, and when he'd meant to go and do it they'd shut up the garage already. Joe balled up the note and stuck it in his pocket. He closed his eyes, focusing on breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, feeling his heart rate slow down gradually.

Joe idly wondered if he was going insane. True, his wartime buddies had been on his mind constantly the first few years after he'd touched down on American soil, but not recently—though occasionally he’d still find himself sitting straight up in bed fifteen years after the end of the war (he'd done the math once: D+5,475), convinced that he was back in a muddy, frozen foxhole with only another man's body heat to warm himself. Having lived in synchronicity with Toccoa men for three years had made it that much more difficult to resign himself to eating alone (it felt even lonelier in public), going to the movies alone, drinking alone. In a bar you could at least get some conversation going, but here he again found that the only things on his mind were the men and the war, and Joe felt that if he let slip something about his time in the army it would get away from him, like a pearl popping off a necklace and rolling under a cabinet, never to be seen again. It was funny, he thought, how he would have given his life for every one of them once, and now the thought of seeing them again in person scared him to death. Joe knew there were reunions because he got the invitations, but as a rule he declined. He needed courage of a different sort than the kind that had propelled him across the open field towards Foy. That was not courage so much as basic training kicking in.

_January 1947_

"People always talk about how much we sacrificed," Joe mused while walking down the streets of San Francisco, his tread firm and his boots pounding the pavement, as if trying to stomp out the dark thoughts like so much dirt from his soles. His uniform had elicited applause and pats on his shoulder from the moment he’d stepped off the ocean liner and during the whole train journey towards the west coast. Just one little cog in the war machine that had brought Hitler's diabolical regime to a halt. ("But without the cogs, there is no machine," Bill Guarnere pointed out.) His thoughts seemed a tornado, laying waste in his brain all day.

"I don’t think my sacrifice was heroic," he wrote down in his diary later that night. "I think many of us jumped at the chance to put their lives into someone else's hands. Self-sacrifice is the easy way out. A substitute for choosing your own destiny." That illusion, he reflected as he looked up at the lamp hanging over his kitchen table, counting three dead flies inside the glass bulb, had been shattered when he came home. He hadn’t depended on coming back at all. "So few of us made it back safely," he continued, muttering the words as he wrote them down, "that I didn't give any thought to the next sixty years of my life."

He had never been much given to writing before the war, but now he found that the lazy circling of thoughts and memories in his brain, like vultures around a carcass, wouldn't stop unless he set them down on paper. He couldn't bring himself to write "Dear diary" and so he wrote the diary entries as if they were letters. He wrote to the one person he could think of who was the sort to keep up a correspondence: David Webster. Webster had written his family a stream of letters, page after page detailing even their uneventful daily routines at Toccoa (he had let Joe read some of them when they first met).

"I'm gonna be a writer," he'd said with the smug undertone Joe came to expect from him. "I'm sending my family my notes so I can turn them into a book when I get home", the last word muffled by the forkful of spaghetti bolognese in his mouth. Webster hadn't even been that gung-ho about the war, but he'd wanted to write about what it was really like: "A maggot's eye view, if you will." ("Crawling on dead bodies?" Joe wondered.) Webster, it had soon become clear to him, had read too much World War I poetry—had read too much of anything, in fact, and was capable of pulling one useless historical fact after another as they shlepped through the ruins, both old and new, of mainland Europe, so that other members of Easy had started to refer to him as "Professor". (Lieutenant Compton had done it too, but they'd been too afraid to be booted to make fun of _him_.) When Webster had coloured with anger and said, "I'm just trying to be educational", they had hooted with laughter.

"These jokers can't even read," Webster had spluttered later that night to Joe, who'd been lying on his cot leafing through a comic book. He’d simply said, "We ain't here to read, Web. We're here to kill Germans", and left it at that. He remembered feeling a little sorry as Webster had lain down on his cot and pouted, visibly annoyed that his "one-of-the-men" shtick wouldn't work out unless he kept his educated mouth shut. He had liked to hear Webster talk whenever he had something insightful to say; he had a nice, clear voice, and syllables that Joe didn't even know existed rolled off his tongue without a hitch. He could make the most clever jokes, and his lips would reveal his even teeth in a slow smile if his audience was truly amused. But he could also be lazy, and sardonic; he despised all officers except Winters and he always chickened out on patrols. It was hard to like him, really, though Joe had tried.

In his letters to Webster, he stumbled over words, forming sentences that he often left dangling. He blamed it on his recollection of Web—he knew he would understand his feelings, having had the same baptism of fire, but he couldn't shake the idea of Web actually reading them and then, with a raised eyebrow and a sly smile, handing them back to him and telling him it wasn't "who" but "whom", and that "germany" should be spelled with a capital letter. He could envision Webster's irritatingly slow smile and found himself crossing out entire parts that he felt Webster might laugh at. The more he wrote, however, the easier his pen skated over the paper, spilling out his thoughts without caring too much about censorship.

"Dear Webster," Joe began, invariably; "greetings from Frisco." He'd start off with platitudes, easing into it, still guarded even in private against an abrupt show of emotion. Once he'd written about his neighbour's new dog, his colourful clientele, and the weather, he'd turn to what was really occupying him that day. Sometimes he'd feel a burst of anger towards Webster apropos of nothing, the way past quarrels sometimes crept up on him when he lay among his crumpled, sweat-soaked bed sheets on a hot summer night, unable to sleep, or on the cold, wintry afternoons when his taxi was choked in traffic and he had to waste precious money to keep the heater going.

"Of course I was cold, Web. I didn't think I was ever gonna be warm again," Joe wrote one night, his brow furrowing at the memory of being reunited with Webster in Mourmelon and falling out within five minutes of being in each other's company. Joe had called him a coward and Webster had called him a cold bastard. Bastogne was another planet, as far as Joe was concerned. "You don't become a cold bastard by living a safe and dull life behind the wheel of a cab or sleeping your way through university. You become one by seeing the frozen bodies of dead men, stacked over the top of a foxhole for extra cover; by knowing that the very trees you're hiding behind are set up to kill you; by quelling the childish impulse of stomping your foot and shouting ‘It's not fair!’ when the fella next to you gets pinked in the neck and you don't."

Missing out on Bastogne had made Webster a stranger. Something was always lost in translation. And yet Joe was grateful for the laughably small mercies that Webster had paid him, trying to make up for something he hadn't been able to comprehend. Usually never one to stick out his neck, he would volunteer to take Joe's place as a translator on patrols. ("Thanks buddy," Joe would reply; casual, but feeling a twinge in his stomach as he walked back to the mess hall that made him look over his shoulder in case it was the last time.) Web would share his rations if Joe, who was always ravenous in the morning (always ravenous, period), had already eaten his to stave off the 12 p.m. dizziness. And he would read to Joe from whichever book he was reading—a paratrooper's manual, his beloved World War I poetry, or a German novel he'd found in an abandoned German machine gun nest—if Joe nudged him and asked him to "educate me, Web, I gotta be smart like you if I wanna make it through this thing." That raised eyebrow and the smile tugging on one corner of his mouth, always skeptical but willing to humour him.

Celebrating his survival only made him think about the men that hadn't made it, the ones who were now in a cold and dark place that Joe returned to again and again in his dreams. Bastogne had nearly killed him; there, his nerves had been like a balloon, ready to pop at any moment. It had felt like being trapped under ice. When Winters made him his runner, he’d saved Joe's life; Joe remembered the rush of tears that had come upon him when he looked into Winters's kind face, his hand on Joe's shoulder, his lips quivering and almost as blue as his eyes. He knew that seeing the surviving men again would trigger something he was sure he didn't want to experience. So Joe kept his memories safely locked up in his diary, in the care of the one person he knew he would never see again. And eventually, the need to write to make sense of it all passed; and then, for years, he hardly ever thought about Webster again, hardly at all.

_September 1961_

He had left the radio on in the kitchen and had just entered to get another cup of coffee when the 8 PM news informed him that a journalist by the name of David Kenyon Webster had gone shark fishing and stayed to sleep with the fishes (his actual words). His boat had been found washed up on the Santa Monica shoreline. Joe froze in the doorway, aware of the cold kitchen tiles under his bare feet, the cold enamel of the mug in his hand, an icy lump settling in his stomach like the cold, rancid beans he'd had in Bastogne. The kitchen swam in front of his eyes and became blurry as tears welled up. He set his mug down on the kitchen table and sat down, burying his head in his arms, scrambling for ways to process the news. Tears leaked on the polished wood. He wiped them away with his sleeve.

You stupid bastard, Joe thought. Shark fishing? I thought you were supposed to be the smart one. The rush of tears rather took him by surprise, as it had been so long since Webster had crossed his mind. It was as if a door in his brain had been forced open, a tide of feelings and memories that didn't seem to belong to him any more spilling out. Though so much time had gone by, men were still dying, having survived the largest conflict in history only to come home and drown in the sea two yards from their doorstep. It was the most ridiculous, unbelievable bad luck. Joe wiped his eyes, a smile quivering in the corner of his mouth as he thought how Web would have been able to pull out some hoity-toity philosophical quote about the irony of it all.

If something inside him had remained frozen ever since he had left Bastogne, Webster had known how to thaw it.


	2. Chapter 2

_So we must keep apart,_   
_You there, I here,_   
_With just the door ajar_   
_That oceans are,_   
_And prayer,_   
_And that pale sustenance,_   
_Despair!_

-Emily Dickinson, “I Cannot Live With You”

* * *

_September 1961_

The day after he learned of Webster's death, Joe tracked down his wife. He wrote her a letter, not wanting to seem too pushy by calling her up, and asked if he could visit her, if they were going to hold a service, and so on. He received a very kind invitation to come down to Santa Monica and no, they weren't going to hold a service; David would have found that kind of thing "phoney". Joe was put off by her calling him David. To him, to them, he was always just Web. He'd also imagined that Web would've liked the idea of people coming to pay tribute to him, old war buddies maybe who would blow wind up his ass saying what a great soldier he'd been, always willing to lay down on the wire to give others a chance, yadda yadda yadda, none of it true, of course. But then, who knew his story? Sunshine and avocados might have agreed more with Web than he'd imagined and made him cast off his troubled writer persona. Joe imagined himself walking up to the pulpit, step by step; the faces of Malarkey, Guarnere, Cobb looking up at him as he smoothed down the napkin on which he'd written his eulogy. What would he have said?

Joe went down to Santa Monica the next weekend he had off, hitching a ride with a drinking buddy, Mike, who happened to be driving there on business on the same day. They roared down the Pacific Coast Highway in his white Dodge pickup. Joe flicked through a comic book, glancing outside the window every now and then as if to check that the ocean was still there. The sun bounced off of it, blinding shards of light strewn across a calm, dark blue canvas like rumpled silk—mocking him, Joe thought, only reminding him of all the lives it had so carelessly swallowed.

The Beach Boys came on the radio and Mike turned it up, clearing his throat as if forcing a rusty instrument, and sang along: "Surfin' is the only way, the only life for me!", even though he was a repo man whose relationship with the ocean consisted of nothing more than the occasional drive along the coastline. Joe rather suspected that the vehicle he was riding in had been "repossessed" by Mike himself, but he had wheels and hadn't had to shell out half a day's earnings for a flight and so kept his mouth shut. "Digging this new band!" Mike shouted over the noise and Joe nodded, forcing himself to smile and thinking back to Camp Toccoa and the impromptu barbershop quartet that had been formed there, to which he'd lent his own (not inconsiderable) tenor.

Mike dropped him off in front of a squat, white stucco house, one in a row of identical houses set along a long boulevard fringed with palm trees. When Webster told him about the home he was going back to, Joe imagined his parents' swanky New York town house with a room just for Web in which he could bang away on his typewriter and leave coffee rings on a mahogany desk and smoke cigarettes until the wallpaper turned yellow and began to peel. Somehow he couldn't reconcile _his_ Webster—the Webster in his mind—with the laid-back youngsters on the Santa Monica streets, dressed in shorts and colourful button-downs that seemed to be de rigeur here.

Joe stood looking at the house from across the street for a moment or two, taking it in. Sweat prickled under the collar of his leather jacket. The smells from a nearby dumpster had wafted over to him on the soft California breeze; softer, it seemed, than it was in Frisco. The garden was a well-kept affair; bursts of orange poppies and clumps of wild lilac and kangaroo paw were neatly tucked behind the beach pebbles lining a gravel path that wound its way up to the front door.

He rang the bell on a doorpost that was choked with vines. As he waited for the door to open he looked over his shoulder at the street behind him. A warm gust like a caress blew his hair into his eyes; he brushed it away, irritably. A Volkswagen the colour of dirty dishwater gleamed in the sun on the driveway to his left. The street was quiet, empty save for the muffled roar of the waves crashing on the beach, the shrieking of the gulls and the rustling of palm leaves in the wind. Joe tapped his fingers against the side of his leg, the lack of city noises amplifying the rapid drumming of his heart.

The door opened and Joe saw a tall black woman in a lilac dress, who gave him a scrutinizing once-over and said, "Mr Liebgott?" Joe blinked, blinked again, and realised he ought to respond; so he shook her hand and said, "Call me Joe, please." Barbara—that was her name—had a warm voice tinged with that lazy Californian drawl. She was polite in a practised way, evidently somebody who could stop her ears (so Joe imagined) during Webster's tangents about history and literature and say "yes dear" and "no dear" with great conviction. She seemed smart, too. Joe  leaned against the refrigerator as she bustled about in the kitchen making coffee. She explained that she worked as a receptionist at the office of the newspaper Webster had begun working for after the war. They were married in 1948 and had been living in Santa Monica ever since. Joe grinned, admiring the saintly patience she must possess to be working as a receptionist, let alone as Webster’s wife.

There was no pall of grief covering the household. Vases of fresh flowers were placed in various corners; the smell of coffee invited memories of lazy, sunny afternoons from his youth. Joe sat down in the living room while Barbara cut lemon cake in the kitchen. The palm trees outside blocked the high midday sun, filling the living room with a cold, green light. The furniture was all plywood. Across the room, the glowing hands of a bakelite clock winked at him like cat's eyes.

Joe gave himself a little tour, circling around the room without touching anything. There was a framed photograph of Webster on the mantle-piece. Joe grabbed the silver frame between his thumb and forefinger and looked at it closely. He had expected to see the standard portrait photograph taken at the beginning of their enlistment, Webster in his brown uniform and the cap askew on his wavy hair, but this photo seemed very recent. Webster was leaning against the door of a Volkswagen Beetle, the latest model, painted a modest beige—the car in the driveway. The picture might have been taken three days ago. Its subject was wearing sunglasses and a white-and-navy striped shirt, his dark brown hair a little longer in defiance of the army crew cut. His arms and legs were crossed and he was laughing at the camera, as if the photographer had just told him a very good joke or (Joe thought wryly) was about to be corrected for making the horrendous mistake of confusing Freud and Jung's theories. Looking down at Webster's cheerful, tan face, Joe swallowed thickly and thought of summer in Berchtesgaden, 1945, as the threat of redeployment to the Pacific briefly billowed and then crumpled just as quickly, like a parachute.

"I took that at Cape Cod last summer," Barbara's voice came from behind. The cups and saucers clinked as she put down the tray. Joe quickly wiped his eyes, pretending to comb a hand through his hair, and turned around to sit down.

"Our last holiday. David had just finished his book about sharks." He hummed his assent, not really knowing what to say. What was it with the sharks? He'd have to ask.

"You're the first of his army buddies to come by," she said as Joe dissolved two sugar cubes in his cup and wondered just how many "army buddies" Webster had boasted of.

"Oh, yeah. Well, Web and I, we were close," he replied cautiously, wondering how much he should reveal. He had no idea how much Webster had told his wife about his time in the army. They had all liked him well enough for being a Toccoa man like themselves, as fit and tough as the rest of them, and generally a good and reliable soldier though one that kept his head down when volunteers were asked for. Maybe his decision to be average had made them all a little suspicious of him. He could easily have become an officer and had been offered the position repeatedly, especially when the ranks had started to thin, but still he'd declined. Joe had remembered feeling a new kind of respect for him when Webster had said that he didn't want the kind of responsibility that allowed him to send dozens of men to their certain deaths with just one word. But he was still the man who had lectured the others on the pronunciation of the names of French villages and who preferred poetry over the latest philandered nudie magazine.

This Joe told Barbara. He didn't mention the letters he'd written, nor the meals, the looks, the beds, the showers they'd shared. There, in the green light that had made the steaming coffee look still and black like fresh tar, the war seemed to have lost all meaning. Barbara let out a breathy laugh when he mentioned the lectures. "That's very like David," she agreed. "The number of times that I..." Shaking her head, she stared down into her cup, not finishing her sentence. Joe thought he might see a tear plop down into her coffee, but when she looked up again her cheeks and eyes were dry.

“But you’ve never exchanged any letters.” It wasn't an accusation.

Joe shrugged: "I was never good with words", thinking about his efforts to articulate his thoughts that had sometimes made him push his pen down on the paper so forcefully that he'd torn through it, trying to shape the barbed wire that surrounded his memories into something meaningful. She found it a good enough justification and didn't press him further.

Then she told him about Webster's life after the army. He had finished his degree at Harvard and had gone to work first at a publishing agency, then as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. In the meantime he had written a memoir that hadn't been picked up by anyone. Joe recalled with a sad smile Webster's concentrated frown while trying to write by the pinprick light of a torch. That must have been a blow to him, he thought. So much for "Webster's War" by Mr Common Man's Mouthpiece. He looked at the crumbs of lemon cake on the saucer in his hand, the hungry Depression-child inside urging to dab them up with his thumb and lick them off, but it didn't seem fitting in the cool, clean room. He set it down on the table but it kept drawing his eye.

"You know, he became interested in sharks about two years ago," Barbara said, and pointed to a map of the west coast that was mounted on a corkboard. "He would go out and look for them, observe them. I never really understood why. I went with him once or twice but I didn't get it. I get seasick, you know, so that probably didn't help. He thought they were misunderstood creatures, incredibly useful in their own way. Me, they just gave me the heebiejeebies." Hearing the last word from her sophisticated mouth made Joe smile. Misunderstood, useful in their own way; Webster's interest immediately made sense to him. Barbara didn't seem to harbour any hatred against the creatures that had so callously ripped her husband out of her life. She gestured at the map, which was covered in colourful pins. "The different colours show where the different species live."

Out of politeness more than a genuine interest Joe had stood up and wandered over to the map. Red, green, blue and yellow pins were clustered along the west coast. He touched the tip of his forefinger to one pin, pressing it slightly deeper into the cork. He thought he felt a sort of surge, momentarily picturing Webster meticulously sticking the pins in the map. He retracted his shaking hand.

"I read that latching onto a topic like that, bordering on the obsessive, is a sign of shell-shock." Barbara had come to stand next to him. She sounded calm, objective; a scholar observing a phenomenon and deducing its cause. She would've made a good one, Joe thought, giving her a sidelong glance, if she'd had the opportunity.

"Shell-shock, sure," he agreed, not wanting to bore her with the ways in which the war was still catching up with him these days (the rattle of acorns falling on the roof of his cab that sounded just like a burst from an M1; the German passenger who'd made his knuckles whiten around the steering wheel while he blabbered on about his first visit to America; the image of Bill Guarnere's bleeding stump of a leg that would suddenly burst in upon him while preparing a steak). He remembered seeing Webster dive into a gutter in Mourmelon after hearing a German 88 whistle overhead. Webster must have had the hell of a D-Day landing, he thought, because how could he have suffered from shell-shock with only Holland and Normandy under his belt? He hadn't even been to Bastogne.

Barbara asked him if he wanted to drive down to the place where they'd found Webster's boat, but Joe declined, knowing that there would be nothing for him there. He thanked Barbara for the coffee and stood up to put on his jacket.

"Oh, I nearly forgot." Barbara darted across the room and began to rummage around in a cabinet. When she came back she had Webster's dog tags in her hand. "Do you want these? He's never so much as looked at them for the past ten years. I don't have any use for them now."

Joe reached for the dented plates, his hand steady as he closed it over Barbara's palm. As he walked down the garden path, giving Barbara a final wave, he clutched them in his pocket, the metal slowly growing warm inside his fist.


	3. Chapter 3

_I remember_   
_Those are pearls that were his eyes._   
_'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'_

-T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

 * * *

After his rendezvous with Webster, the morning crept on like any other. Joe found his eyes constantly drawn towards the rear view mirror, like a reflex, and noticed some of his passengers squirming and trying to move out of his line of vision. They probably found him unnerving. Well, he was pretty fucking unnerved himself.

The clouds had given way to a clear, chilly morning. Joe watched the exhaust gases from cold engines coagulate in the air, disappearing with the slightest puff of wind like ghosts. He lit up a cigarette, rolled down his window and blew the smoke through the crack. He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. As he scanned the sidewalks for people waving at him, he couldn't suppress the tiniest spark of hope that today would be the day that a nice-looking Jewish girl slid into his backseat. It had happened a few times before, in all the fifteen years that he'd been driving his cab; but they'd either been accompanied by nice-looking Jewish boys or by their mothers. The only time he'd properly turned on the charm for a girl, she'd only had to go two blocks—something you'd think he'd have paid attention to—and got out again in five minutes.

You had to be a people person to drive a cab; no doubt about that. Joe amped himself up for it every morning, had a wink and a smile ready for every passenger. He had his razor sharp barber's tongue and he prided himself on being able to draw out a ten-minute conversation even from the stiffest of gentlemen with the curtest of replies. He often felt like a ventriloquist, letting Joe the Driver do all the talking while he himself, the real Joe, sat back and watched the reactions in the audience. Easier to make a character of himself. It was exhausting on days like today, when he didn't have the energy for it; that was all.

Joe hardly dared admit it to himself, but it wasn't just girls that he was on the lookout for. It wasn't the sort of thing you bandied about—he remembered the millions of men who had been given an honorable discharge because of their sexuality during the war—and by now, keeping it a secret had become such a part of him that he never gave any thought to doing anything about it. He could still recall an intense moment some five years ago when a man with astonishing green eyes had slid into the back of his cab, stated his address, and locked his eyes onto Joe's, holding them captive for what seemed like an eternity. Joe had torn his gaze away and felt himself blush furiously, his heart racing much as it had this morning. It was too dangerous, he told himself. You can't risk it. Still, he couldn't avoid the Castro; it was one of the most lucrative places to work because the people who lived there felt more at ease taking a cab through the city than a streetcar. Joe had even begun recognizing some of the locals, and they him. It made him feel at ease to know there were others like him, even if he would never move to such a neighbourhood and make it known. But the least thing he could do, he figured, was give them a safe ride.

He knew that not many would admit to it, but spending three years with the same guys, sharing beds, foxholes, showers, secrets and laughs, revealed for many of them desires that they didn't even know they had, simmering just below the surface. Especially in Bastogne the comfort of a warm body next to him, which he would crave as much as a hot cup of coffee, had sometimes been enough to bring tears to Joe's eyes and make him cling a little tighter to McClung or Babe, the machine-gun rattle of their teeth close to his ear. Then there were the stripteases in the barracks after and before the showers—he remembered one particular instance where Luz slid out of his PE gear with such a saucy movement that it made little Joe perk up for a moment. One of his most precious memories was when was lying under a tarpaulin heaped with overnight snow, just dozing off when a flurry of movement startled him awake. The darkness was absolute, even the flares were at peace, and Joe freaked out thinking it was a Kraut who had slipped through the line to slit his throat. He attempted to reach his trench knife and struggled briefly with the invader until he felt a finger on his lips, puffs of hot, heavy breath on his neck, and a large hand kneading his groin. He barely had time to register all this before the fingers started digging through the layers of clothing to get to his crotch, after which all he recalled was a blissful nothingness that washed over him and lulled him to sleep. The next morning he looked closely at the pale, haggard faces to see who had been so kind to him, that he might repay the favour, but he didn't catch a twinkle in anyone's eye. He wondered whether he was even the one they'd been looking for.

* * *

Joe rapidly sucked on his cigarette. When the light turned green he tossed it out of the window and pulled up. He *had* to have hallucinated the whole thing. He was sleep-deprived, of course; he'd been sleep-deprived ever since he set foot in Camp Toccoa. A lack of sleep gave you hallucinations, didn't it? (Doc Roe would have known.)

He hadn't had his coffee yet—that was it. Three hours in on any shift, he made a point of visiting the take-away coffee shop for a sorely needed shot of caffeine. Coffee was what had essentially kept him alive in Europe; in the most dire moments, a cup of coffee was often the only thing that Roe could offer them, and it soothed them more than any medicine could. Even when they had nothing—no ammo, no gloves, no fire, no end in sight—they had coffee.

Americano in one hand and the other on the wheel, Joe navigated the morning traffic. On a wintry day like this, steam from the cold car engines spread a layer like fog over the ground and the lights of the other cars stretched out in the dusk like a line of fireflies; a landing strip that went on and on, with no final destination to touch down at. He slurped at his coffee as he flattened the gas to catch the orange light. He felt the sharp burn of the wheel spinning in his palm as it lurched sharply to the left and his car spun around in the middle of the ice-glazed road. A white van roared past from the left, missing his right-hand mirror by a hair's breadth.

Gripping the wheel, Joe found himself staring at a crowd of pedestrians waiting to cross. They were all staring at him. A cacophony of horns reverberated in his ears and he became aware of the hot, sticky coffee stain slowly spreading out over his lap. He blinked and looked left at two lanes of angry drivers whose way his turned taxi was blocking. The pedestrians' light turned green. He was in the middle of the crossing and furious-looking businessmen filed past his hood.

Galvanized by the adrenaline, he threw the cab into reverse and navigated himself back to the red light he should have stopped at. He tried to regain control over his breathing, but it was no use, he was going into hyperventilation, and when the light turned green he sped off and parked by the side of the road the first chance he got. He buried his face in his shaking hands, trying to grasp what had happened. How had he missed that van? He'd been distracted thinking about Webster, and yet somehow his instincts had kicked in and he'd steered away just in time. Or had he? He lowered one hand and looked down at the angry red mark where the wheel had dug into his palm. He couldn't remember ever steering away so quickly and forcefully that it left a mark on his hands. He would also never have been so close to an accident before if it hadn't been for the events of that morning.

"First time for everything," he said out loud, but it was barely more than a whisper.      

Exhaustion clouded his head. The wheel had spun in his hand with such ease—it must have been a knee-jerk reflex of some kind. His brain had kept him alive during the war in mysterious ways and it was doing so now. Really, it deserved a day off. He rubbed his face and looked down at his lap, brown and sticky with the remains of his coffee. Maybe he should just cash in on his sick leave. Somehow it didn't feel like it was going to be his day.

He went and clocked out, then drove home and sat in the taxi for another ten minutes before he went inside, staring at his rear view mirror, wanting—wishing, he realised—for a glimpse of those eyes, anything that would tell him if he was going mad or not. To his mind, there had never been any doubt whether or not they were Webster’s eyes. In the gloom of the backseat they had been almost luminous, like the mother-of-pearl buttons his mother used to keep locked in a drawer and would only let him look at if he had been good. When he was young he would pretend to be a pirate, with those buttons as his treasure. They were the most valuable thing he knew.

When nothing appeared, he got out, locked his car and fumbled in his pocket for his keys. His fingers closed over Webster's dog tags, which had sat in his pocket the entire time. When he entered the living room he flung them on the couch, then went into the bedroom and pulled the curtains closed. He stripped down to his white tanktop and boxers and laid back on the mattress. He touched his palm to his temple, almost praying for a fever, just so he’d have an actual excuse to call in sick tomorrow, but he only felt the blood pumping wildly in the veins there, the beginnings of a headache.

Willing himself to go to sleep, Joe buried himself under his blanket; but it was no use, he was awake, millstones were grinding in his head and he sat up again, opening the curtain to a chink. He opened his bedside drawer and rummaged around until he found his journal. He flicked through it quickly, unable even in his vulnerable current state to read back previous entries without cringing at his own ham-fisted attempts to translate his feelings into nouns, verbs, modifiers.

His mother never did anything with the buttons. They were too precious to be used on clothes she wore daily. They stayed in the drawer.

He plucked the ballpoint from where it had been clipped to the back, wrote down the date, and began:

"Dear Webster."


	4. Chapter 4

_Sweetest love, I do not go,_  
 _For weariness of thee,_  
 _Nor in hope the world can show_  
 _A fitter love for me;_  
 _But since that I_  
 _Must die at last, 'tis best_  
 _To use myself in jest_  
 _Thus by feign'd deaths to die._  
  
-John Donne, "Song: Sweetest love, I do not go"  
  
* * *

The next day, Joe went back to work and tried to put the incident down to the dark dredges of war in his brain, which at times sparked reflexes and impulses he knew he couldn't control, like an overcharged fuse box. His mind was constantly leading him through passages and around corners where things lurked that he wanted to avoid; and though something nagged at him to talk to a psychiatrist about this (not that he could afford one), he knew it wouldn't help much. What could some hoity-toity Yale brainiac who had only read about Normandy and Bastogne in the papers tell him about what had happened to him? Webster would have made a good one, forever analysing the war and its effects, and having been on the front lines he at least knew what he was talking about. Or he'd liked to think he did. Mostly he'd just complained about Lieutenant Peacock.

Having left his cab behind in the garage after a rather uneventful day without any ghostly visitors, Joe wiped his shoes on the threadbare doormat as he fumbled in his pocket for his keys. His fingers touched paper; the balled-up note he'd crammed in there earlier. He kept it in his fist as he slotted the key in the lock. When he was inside, he turned on a lamp with a yellowing shade on his dresser, tossed his keys carelessly in the fruit bowl which never had any fruit in it, and unfolded the wad of paper by the lamplight that was slowly growing brighter. The handwriting was a messy cursive. Forgetting to take off his jacket, he squinted at the words, trying to make sense of them.

"This is some medieval bullshit," he muttered, and walked into the dark kitchen, shrugging off his jacket and throwing it over the back of his single chair. He flicked on the light and turned on the stove to brew a cup of coffee. As the percolator began to diffuse the warming smell of coffee, Joe sat down, flattened the crumpled paper on the wooden table top, and began poring over it.

"Let not," he read out loud, "thy divining heart forethink me any ill. Destiny may take thy part, and may thy fears fulfill. But think that we are but turned aside to sleep; they who one another keep alive, ne'er parted be. Hoo boy," he whistled, recalling reading any line in Shakespeare three times over during his high school English classes before it began to make sense to him. The words scattered around in his brain like leaves. He read the note closely a second time, familiarizing himself with the words. They were not song lyrics from the coiffed guitarist in his backseat, then. It was clearly a poem, "one of them old timers" as his English teacher had been fond of calling them. He got up and poured himself a cup of coffee, then went to the living room to grab his diary. Having copied the poem down on an empty page, he sat chewing the hard plastic end of his pen while trying to come up with an adequate rephrasing of the words. In the end, he simply underlined the last line. It had a nice ring to it. The words of the poem were archaic, they seemed like old volumes that were taken off the shelf for the first time in years, and their covers of dust blown off.

"'Think that we are but turned aside to sleep,'" he read out loud, and he thought how among all the men he'd seen with blown-up chests, blown-off heads, missing limbs and pouring blood, how many he'd seen who had been hit and who'd simply given a sort of sigh and crumpled to the ground, as if collapsing from exhaustion. He recalled the men who lay motionless in their foxholes while snowflakes gently shrouded them, nearly indistinguishable from the men in the next hole over who had frozen to death. He recalled how cold he'd been, so cold that it had almost felt like being warm again; his very mind frostbitten and sluggish, seemingly ready to drop over the edge at any moment and to give in to the fatigue...

He read the poem again and thought how strange it was that an ancient poem like that had ended up in the back of his cab. And not just that—it actually meant something to him. That last line—"'They who one another keep alive, ne'er parted be'"—did that not perfectly capture the flame of love for his friends that he'd kept burning in his chest all these years?

The hands of the clock moved without mercy as Joe sat at the table, getting up only to make more coffee, and stared out at the reddish clouds in a light-polluted night sky.

* * *

Some days later, Joe received a letter from his mother telling him that his favourite uncle Levi had died peacefully in his sleep in his New York City apartment. His eyes racing over the words, Joe sank down on the couch, reading the letter over and over again until it crumpled in his hand and the ink ran, tears turning the words into black smudges. At least his uncle had gone in a painless way; but Jews were still dying even though the war was over. Death seemed to hang over them like a cloud of poison gas, he thought, and cursed himself again for having been so careless in his cab the other day. Survive Bastogne and die in San Francisco? He felt ashamed of himself, thinking of the blue-lipped corpses leaning against the trees in the Bois Jacques who would've given anything to have made it back to the States and resume their normal life. If you could call it normal.

He wept, his shuddering intakes of breath and staccato sobs absurdly loud in his quiet living room, until pain coursed and pulsated through his brain. Exhausted, his cheeks burning and raw with streaks of tears, he curled up on the couch on his side and stared at the brown wallpaper, patternless save for the circles of water damage just below the ceiling. Even in his reflection in the foggy glass of the television screen the bags under his eyes were visible, and he thought—a sudden urge to panic coming over him— _I can't go on like this._

Something settled on his shoulder. Joe froze. A mouse? A roach? He knew he should have called the exterminator weeks ago. It didn't move; it was warm, heavy where it touched his shirt. Joe chanced a look at his shoulder, straining his eyes without moving his head. He could see nothing, but the pressure was still there. He squinted at the television screen. He saw only himself, curled up in a foetal position, but he felt his arms begin to shake as his muscles contracted. Very softly, it started to move: a light brush, just like a thumb caressing his shoulder. No, he wasn't imagining it—he _felt_  it. He shot up, swatting at his shoulder and shaking his whole torso as if there'd been a spider on him. He eyeballed the room, which seemed to be closing in on him, hearing only his own ragged breathing. As his breath subsided, other sounds came to him: the usual symphony of car horns outside, and the clank-rattle of the central heater warming up. He sniffed; a vague smell of something like fish penetrated his apartment, wafting through the air duct from the night market a block away.

He sat very still. He touched his shoulder, gingerly, but it just felt like his shoulder.

"Coulda been a roach," he said out loud, and heard the tremble in his voice. He knew it hadn't been a roach. Roaches scurried, too quick to be caught, and so did mice. But it had _moved_ , damn it. He tried to think what else it could have been. A muscle spasm? His breath caught when, after a moment or two, he felt a squeeze—very gentle—on his left knee. It moved again; Joe looked down, amazed, as he saw the folds and creases in his brown slacks being smoothed out and reappearing again with every movement back and forth across his leg. Almost, he thought, almost like the touch of a hand. The pressure was lifted, and Joe, realising he'd been holding his breath, let it out in small puffs as it reappeared on his left shoulder. He looked down at his hands, which were quivering as if he'd had an electric shock. He clenched them into fists. He was shivering, the invisible touches doing little to calm him down.

Still the hand kept stroking—indeed it now felt like a hand, and he could feel the pressure of the individual digits pressing into his shoulder blade. He briefly toyed with the thought that after his brush with death earlier that week, this was surely the Grim Reaper come to claim him after all, but the hand wasn't cold and bony and it didn't grip him forcefully from behind like it did to hapless characters in comics. It felt human. He reached for it and closed down on his own shoulder, his fingers moving through air. The pressure grew stronger, kneading his shoulder as if trying to rub out the pain. He felt his heart beating wildly, incredibly aware of the eerie sensation, and a cold shiver ran through him like a current, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Not knowing whether it was his uncle, Webster, or anyone else he'd been stupidly lucky enough to outlive providing comfort from beyond the grave, he relaxed his tensed shoulders, feeling suddenly tired, as if all his energy had been squeezed out of him like a dish towel. Disoriented by the events of the past week, all he wanted to do was give himself over to the comforting touch of the warm hand that now moved to the back of his neck, stroking the short brown hair there, moulding and squeezing his stiff muscles. It felt like heaven. Joe closed his eyes and sighed. Somebody seemed to whisper his name, but it was at the far end of a tunnel; he wasn't sure if it had been a groan from the heater or a particularly loud car horn or merely an echo of that day when, the war momentarily forgotten, he'd stared into a pair of eyes bluer than the sky that was impaled on the jagged peaks of the Austrian mountains. The hand felt warm and as real as Webster's hands had been in real life. As he leaned into the touch, Joe realised that he was starting to, no, wanting to believe that it was really him. (It could have been Uncle Levi, but, he reasoned, Uncle Levi, being something of a hypochondriac, had never so much as hugged him in real life.)

"Webster?" he asked, and the rubbing stopped. Joe sat, statue-like—suddenly recalling, absurdly, the frozen German soldier lying outside the shed in Mourmelon, whose hand they all shook, as a sort of ceremony, before they went out on patrol. The invisible hand lifted again and he felt a soft _whoosh—_ nothing like a shell blast, more like a sea breeze—and found himself alone on his couch. He stood up and closed the window.


	5. Chapter 5

_Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth._  
  
-Margaret Atwood,  _The Blind Assassin_

* * *

Joe remained vigilant for signs of what he now believed to be Webster's ghost, and consequently he found them, though they freaked him out without fail. A reassuring squeeze on his wrist on the morning he was standing in front of his mirror, rehearsing to his reflection what he would say when asking his boss for a higher Christmas bonus (in the end, he bartered and charmed his way up to an additional twenty cents an hour). A hand resting on his bowed back as he walked through the thronging crowds on the shopping streets of San Francisco on a rare Friday off (he was wary of large crowds, these days). A dip in the bed next to him when he had one foot hovering over the abyss of sleep. The instances were far and few between, and he wondered if maybe he should say something to Webster, to assure himself of his presence; but as the last time he'd said his name aloud he'd chased off the ghost, caution whispered to him not to do it again. Joe remembered having read somewhere that sometimes you needed to say the dead person's name three times for them to appear, but who knew if that applied to all ghosts? Who knew if the whole thing wasn't a giant hallucination? Maybe his senses were still unreliable as they had been during the war due to a lack of sleep, a lack of food. It might even be indigestion. He thought of the homeless man who hung around the liquor store on 3rd, usually engaged in an animated conversation with himself. Maybe he had a ghost too?

A week after he'd received the letter Joe started his shift as he normally did. He automatically checked the back seat for Webster (to no avail), drove to his usual spot where, as the morning fog began to lift, clumps of people slowly began to drift onto the sidewalks, and drove his first few customers. Where the touches were comforting at first, the time that elapsed between them became fraught with tension as Joe bargained with himself whether or not he was imagining them or not; whether Webster was right there beside him at that moment or not; and why wouldn't he be?

 _Okay, everything is going fine_ , he thought to himself as he was driving, his eyes flicking up to his rear view mirror every now and then. _You're doing great! It's been half an hour and you haven't even thought about him. It's a normal day, and you're doing your job as usual._  As he waved at the Chinese tourist couple who got out and handed him a generous tip, he felt the corners of his mouth trembling with the strain of smiling and hiding behind the persona of the cheerful cabbie. During the rest of the day, his mind would drift back to the fateful night and he found himself blinking back tears that would surface unannounced. He imagined himself in a big, empty room, its corners filled with the darkness that shied away from the spotlight which was trained on him sitting in the middle, hugging his knees to his chest and trying not to cry. The image was as clear to him as if it had been a painting. He felt isolated in his grief, and his mind kept drifting back to Webster. How could it not? Were the sporadic touches to remain fleeting and beyond his reach? Had he really blown the whole thing by saying Webster's name? Or did Webster just not want to be with him after all?

He was starting to feel silly about the whole thing again, recalling that even the most sensible men in E Company, arguably the most sensible unit in the 101st, had been as superstitious as sailors. There had been enough small rituals, like the order in which clothes were put on and weapons assembled, and good-luck charms like tiny crosses that clanked against dog tags, but it was Captain Nixon—a man too cynical to believe in anything more supernatural than the absinthe fairy—who had started the rumour of the German ghost horse and cart in Holland. Chuck Grant had overhead Nixon talking to Captain Winters in Holland saying he had heard it riding around all night, and that he had called for a mortar to put it out of service. Though the aim had been perfect, the artillery barrage had been in vain; he'd heard it again the next night. Lot of baloney, was Joe's verdict when Grant told him; but one night in Bastogne, when the cold seemed to numb all movement and sound, he himself had heard the squeaking of wagon wheels and then the neighing of the horse, maybe two hundred yards away. If anybody had asked him, he would've sworn to it, as it had happened on the third night after they had dug in and he was still been on the alert, his brain not yet clouded by cold, exhaustion and fraying nerves. Their breath, crystallized white clouds against the dark night sky, seemed to freeze on the spot as they listened to the sounds. And in Mourmelon Webster had come up to him, having been relieved from a week of outpost duty, and sworn to him wide-eyed that he'd heard the cart and the horse too, but that he hadn't seen anything. Some soldiers ventured the guess that the German driver of the cart had been killed and come back to visit his buddies every now and then. It was a nice thought, but it made Joe uncomfortable to think of all the deceased members of Easy Company who might be hanging around. Maybe Webster was just the first to come and haunt him and would soon be moving on to the next veteran while Muck, Penkala, Hoobler and the others were waiting in the wings to drop by.

          As he drove around that day, he gave up on the idea of his peace of mind getting restored. He turned on the radio, but could not stop himself switching the channel before he'd heard the end of even one song. His eyes seemed glued to the mirror, and it wasn't until a painful twinge like a knife between his shoulder blades make him perk up that he realised he'd been hunched over the wheel, his shoulders hard and tense like a live wire, for hours. Several times he imagined he could feel a phantom touch on his knee, making his leg jolt so that once he accidentally lifted his foot off of the brake just before a red light. Cursing his restless mind, Joe rubbed his weary eyes as he pulled up at the light just in time.

          When he came home, he sat down on the sofa without taking his coat off, and buried his face in his hands. He didn't know how many minutes passed while he sat like this, heaving deep, shuddering sighs that refused to become sobs. Slowly his breathing calmed, his chest no longer like a balloon losing its air. Looking up from the cup of his hands, he glanced around the room. The only thing that drew his eye, distracting from the stillness of the interior, was the steam that billowed next to his window, signalling that his next door neighbour was taking a shower. He sniffed, picking up the same faint odour of fish as yesterday that he couldn't recall having smelled before then.  
Joe went into his bedroom, stripped down and left his jeans and T-shirt puddled on the carpet. Kicking off his shoes into the corner, he curled up on his side, hugging his knees and feeling for the first time that day a feeling of intense contentment as he burrowed under his heavy duvet. "'Think that we are but turned aside to sleep'", he murmured to himself, the words by now feeling as familiar on his tongue as his mother's homemade caramel candies.

Something heavy slid in bed next to him. Joe froze. He'd felt it happen before, although as it was usually just before he dropped off to sleep and he woke up alone, he'd thought he'd imagined it. But there was undeniably a heavy pressure on the mattress next to him, and a warmth that signaled the presence of a body.

"Thought ghosts were supposed to be cold as ice," Joe said, not really thinking, turning over on his side towards the movement. It stopped, just for a moment, and then a tossing and squirming as though it tried to get comfortable. Joe saw a definite hump under the duvet, and the pillow bore the imprint of a head in the middle. As it was a particularly cold night and he could see the matte glaze of ice on his window, he let out a visible, shuddering breath and tentatively reached out towards his ghostly bedfellow. His hand passed through air, again; but it felt as if he were sticking his hand into an oven, a current of hot air enveloping his hand. He moved his hand back and forth, from the warm blaze to the stuffy air underneath the duvet, then withdrew again and reached for the dip in the pillow. His fingers shook slightly as he prepared for the touch of skin, but as he gingerly lowered his hand, he saw he could lay it down in the hollow in the pillow. Joe wanted to cry with frustration when he felt fingers—definitely fingers—close around his wrist and move his hand away from the pillow and under the sheets. The fingers brushed against his underpants and came to rest on his thigh.

Both excited and disturbed by the ghostly touch and the sensation of a thumb describing circles on his upper leg, Joe slowly moved into the cumulus of warmth that was—he imagined—Webster's body. To his surprise, he felt the other arm slide across his back and press his body closer. Joe stared ahead at the edge of his pillow, a chunk of it lit up a milky white by the lantern just outside his window, seeing but not really registering it as he was enveloped by warmth. He had shared a bunk with Webster before, huddling together for a lack of space and against the cold of the draughty billet. And in the middle of the night—like now—Webster had shifted closer to him and he'd been overwhelmingly aware of the soft rush of Webster's breath, the brush of his lips on his neck, and the sheer presence of the body next to him, though they were both fully clothed. As he did then, Joe felt an unfamiliar tenderness spreading slowly through his body and heating his blood, like a drop of ink in a glass of water; and he realised that these tender feelings could only arise when sharing a bed with one of his friends from Easy. Back then, all he'd been able to do was bite his lip and pray that his body wouldn't react, as it was wont to do, and create a _very_ uncomfortable situation in the morning. As it turned out the telltale white stains were pretty difficult to get out of the coarse, government-issue khaki, and were sure to attract jeers from the guys and raised eyebrows from the washing woman when he went to retrieve them. Two hundred men, all shitting, vomiting, farting, jerking off around one another for two years, and yet he felt it, still, to be intensely personal.

He breathed out slowly, his breath actually a cloud in the freezing bedroom, when the hand on his thigh moved up to rest on his crotch. Little Joe instantly sprang to life, unused to the unfamiliar touch, and when the hand began to move Joe stifled a cry in his pillow. He felt the slow, delicious buildup towards an orgasm, lasting not nearly as long as he wanted, and when he had climaxed he turned around, desperately gazing into thin air. Fingers brushed his cheek and he squinted, willing the ghost into existence, but still there was nothing to be seen except the dip in the pillow.

"Thanks, Web," he whispered, bracing himself for the rush of cold air as the ghost departed as it had done the night before, but before post-coital drowsiness washed over him he was aware that he remained cocooned in the warm embrace.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! Real life caught up with me. See the notes below for an English translation of the passage in German.

__ Shake hands, we shall never be friends; give over:  
I only vex you the more I try.  
All’s wrong that ever I’ve done and said,  
And nought to help it in this dull head:  
Shake hands, goodnight, goodbye.

__ But if you come to a road where danger  
Or guilt or anguish or shame’s to share  
Be good to the lad that loves you true  
And the soul that was born to die for you,  
And whistle and I’ll be there.

-A.E. Houseman

* * *

_ September 1961 _

Light leaked in through the crack at the top, translucent and white. He hugged his knees as he sat, tucked away in a corner of the room, with dark grey, cold walls towering above him, reaching towards a ceiling he could not see.

The single door in the corner of the room had been tried and failed. It seemed to him he was in a vacuum that was sucking out whatever it was that was inside him—and he was crumpling, folding inside himself, like a soda can emptied of its last drops. He felt the strange absence of a pulse, and of oxygen in his lungs.

He looked down at his hands, bathed in the shifting puddles of light. For the longest time, he only heard the low hum of _nothingness_ ; silence that was actually composed of many sounds: the churning of tectonic mechanisms; water that seemed now to rush, now to remain stock-still; the grinding of millions of grains of sand, magnified until he could not tell it apart from the gnashing of his own teeth. Then—a voice. There was no question of who it was. It boomed and bounced around the room, drowning out all other sound. To his surprise, he heard his name. 

“…bastard, Web, I thought you…” and then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped again. It was a snippet, mixed with static, as though coming from a radio badly in need of tuning.

Voices drifted in through the crack, snatches of conversations, transient like the light; each time he made an effort to understand them, they faded away. At the same time, darkness pushed out the light that came through the crack at the top, as if somebody was winding down the shutters.

A slow  _creak_ reverberated around the room. He peered at the doorway through the gloom. A sliver of light had appeared.

As he pushed against the heavy door he closed his eyes against the blinding light. The voices grew louder but still shifted, as if he was passing them by, racing ahead. He opened his eyes and saw a windshield, and through the windshield, a quiet residential street. Somebody was in the passenger’s seat in front of him. He saw dark hair, shot with grey, moving in the rear view mirror.

* * *

_ October 1961 _

He stumbled out of bed at 5 a.m. as usual and found the sheets turned back, the telltale dip in the mattress gone. Scratching his balls, he slouched into the kitchen, turning on every light as he went. Their glow, reflected in the windows, turned the dark morning outside into blocks of obsidian. When he reached the kitchen, he blindly flicked on the coffee machine and the light, and found, as he rummaged in his cupboard between the chipped mugs, that he saw something hovering on the edge of his vision.

Joe whipped around, but as his gaze swept through the kitchen, past the refrigerator, the table and the chairs caught in an orb of light, to the back door that opened to the small balcony, he saw nothing.  

“Webster?” he said out loud, but heard no response. Cautiously, he turned back to the cupboard—and there it was! Something shimmered and shifted just to his left. When he turned his head, it was gone again.

Shaking his head, Joe poured a few inches of water in a skillet, gingerly lowered an egg in it with a spoon and lit the stove.

No two ways about it. Webster’s ghost was definitely here, and he was standing right next to him. Joe no longer feared that speaking his name would chase him off; hell, the number of times he’d moaned the name out loud last night had, if anything, brought him closer. But what was it that held his tongue, still, this morning? The fact that Webster couldn’t talk back? (More than anything, a comfort!) No, Joe realised; he was afraid he would chase Webster off himself, because he couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut. Though the fleeting touches that he had begun to grow used to in the past two weeks had made him nervous, lose sleep, and damn near got him into a fatal accident, they made him feel calmer on the inside, too; calmer than he’d felt in fifteen years. He thought back to the evening when he read about his uncle’s death, and the memory of the warm touch at the moment he’d needed it most gave him butterflies. And after last night—it was hard to believe it  _ wasn’t _ Webster.

“As you can tell, Web, I’m not really a ‘morning after talk’ kinda guy,” he said out loud, suppressing a smile as he turned off the stove. “Sure wish we could clear a coupla things up, though. I mean, not that I’m not enjoying your little game of blind man’s bluff—Ah!” He had drained the skillet and run the pan under some cold water, but nearly dropped the still-hot egg when he took it from the pan. He grabbed some cutlery with a clatter, and sat down at the table. The egg had burst while boiling and from the crack the egg white bubbled, silky froth that reminded him of crumpled parachutes hanging from church spires in Normandy. Joe sliced off the top with his bread knife, generously sprinkled the egg with salt and tucked in. To his right, Webster shimmered, still all touch and no sound: a swath of dark hair, pale skin and murky-coloured clothes. Joe got up and went to fetch the newspaper, glancing back twice to check; but only when he sat down did the figure of Webster appear to him again, just outside of his vision.

Joe folded out the newspaper, the ink of which was still wet and blackened his fingertips, and began to leaf through it with one hand. Skimming the headlines, a dozen of which contained the word “Vietnam,” he yawned, realising, as it went on for five seconds, how tired he really was. For the past decade he’d been in survival mode, looking down at his feet and concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other; but now he felt he had one foot in the past, back in Europe, and one foot hovering over the morass of an unknown future. He could not fathom it. Fifteen years after setting foot on American soil again. Fifteen years in this hole in Frisco; fifteen years driving people around and catching glimpses of the lives of others, never interfering. Fifteen years of no plans; fifteen years of looking back on the twenty-five before that. The ferryman, not the hero from the upper world. In this way, Joe reflected, he felt like a ghost himself. It seemed to him that the denser Webster grew next to him, the heavier his touch, the clearer his image, the more he himself felt as if he was losing contact with the ground. The moment between the jump and the landing, when they floated down from the airplanes like dandelion seeds, watching the world below them where people went about their business, observing, then infiltrating, then leaving again—that was how he felt.

The chair to his right creaked, as if it bore quite a bit of weight. Joe looked up at the empty space. Though he knew it wasn’t— _ couldn’t be _ —the  _ real  _ Webster (then again, what was real? He used to think ghosts weren’t real), it felt like being in the same room with him again. It wasn’t necessarily a question of smells or sounds; it was as if he was picking up on certain vibrations, which to his restless mind were like fingers massaging his temples. His fear of seeing anyone from Easy Company again, Joe reflected, had been like fear of driving; if you never did it, it would only appear scarier and scarier from then on. And though Joe knew that there was nothing scary about it, that being among the only men who he ever felt had understood him might in fact have been a comfort, it was the voice in his head that hissed, “They’re better off without you,” that had been, and was still, keeping him from reaching out. 

“Better off alone,” Joe would chant every time he felt pricked by jealousy whenever he saw happy couples embracing in the lobby at the movies, whenever he looked ahead at the traffic if he suspected flirtatious motives behind a glance lingering in his rear view mirror, whenever he stuck his key in the lock in the evening and reflected, wiping the dust off his television screen, that at least he didn’t have to make compromises or clean up his apartment for anyone.

Except now, he wasn’t alone any more.

What was the reason Webster had come to him after he died? Why not to his wife, or to anyone else?

_ You know the reason,  _ he thought.

* * *

_ May 1945 _

“Read to me, Web,” Joe ordered as he folded his arms under his head. They were sunning themselves near the lake, and a watery spring sun was just beginning to peek over the mountaintops. Grant and Heffron had stripped to their shorts and were splashing about in the icy lake. They had reluctantly let Webster tag along.

“What’ll it be today, Joe? Ah—I have  _ Der Tod in Venedig,  _ found it in a Nazi fireplace yesterday. It was only a little singed.” Webster produced the copy from his bag. "I don't know why a Nazi would have it, since Mann fled the country in '36, but..."

Joe squinted against the sun and inclined his head a little to look at the blackened cover.

“That book about the pervert who gets cholera?”

“You’ve read it?” Webster said, incredulous. Earlier that afternoon they’d been discussing Joe’s collection of comic books, which were composed of Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon, mostly.

“Hell yeah, I read it. My dad was German, he had it on his bookshelf. I was fifteen and looking for a dirty book to read.”  He grinned at Webster. “It was dirty all right.”

“It’s all I have with me,” Webster said, sounding put out. Joe put his hand over his eyes against the sun, and gave a noncommittal wave with the other.

“I don’t care. Read where ya left off. Be nice to hear some real German again, something other than _‘Feuer frei’_ and _‘Nicht schiessen.’_ ”

Webster leafed through the pages to where he’d earmarked the place he had left off. He began to read:

_ “Seltsamer, heikler ist nichts als das Verhältnis von Menschen, die sich nur mit den Augen kennen--die täglich, ja stündlich einander begegnen, beobachten und dabei den Schein gleichgültiger Fremdheit grusslos und wortlos aufrecht zu halten durch Sittenzwang oder eigene Grille genötigt sind. Zwischen ihnen ist Unruhe und überreizte Neugier, die Hysterie eines unbefriedigten, unnatürlich unterdrückten Erkenntnis-und Austauschbedürfnisses und namentlich auch eine Art von gespannter Achtung. Denn der Mensch liebt und ehrt den Menschen, so lange er ihn nicht zu beurteilen vermag, und die Sehnsucht ist ein Erzeugnis mangelhafter Erkenntnis…” _

As Webster’s voice drifted over him, Joe opened his eyes again and looked at the mountains across, rising up above the lake. He knew their time in this sun-drenched meadow would soon come to an end; soon he would be home again, in Frisco, driving his cab.

* * *

_ October 1961 _

“Web, was it you?” he asked the phantom. He reached over and opened his diary, which was lying face-down on the table. From between the pages he extracted the scrap of paper he had mulled over for several evenings. To his amazement, the paper floated up, grabbed by an invisible hand. Staring sideways, Joe watched as the translucent smear that was Webster held the note up to his face.

“Oy—let me get—” Joe stood up abruptly, nearly knocking his chair over, and began to pull out kitchen drawers looking for a pen and paper. Having found them, he returned to the table, Webster hovering to his right.

“So, let’s establish the facts, okay Web? You can’t talk—” The pencil stump scratched, “You can  _ touch _ —“ scratch, scratch, “—you can obviously hear… but can you write?” And he laid down the pencil. His pulse jumped as he saw it being picked up, and letters began to appear underneath his questions.

“Hi, Joe,” it read, and tears filled Joe’s eyes. He blinked quickly to stop their march to the surface.

“Hi,” he said, not liking how hoarse his voice sounded. He cleared his throat. “Web, what’s going on? Why are you here? How come I can’t see you?”

The pencil was still for a long time. Then it began to write:

“Not sure how I got here. I was in… some place. It was cold and dark. I heard your voice. You called me a bastard.”

Joe stared at the letters, incredulous.

“I… well, sure, I've called you a bastard plenty of times. Are—are you that petty that you came back from the grave to cuss me out?” He broke into nervous laughter. The whole thing was absurd!

The pencil didn’t move. Joe wiped tears of mirth from his eyes and took a sip of coffee, his shoulders still shaking. “Ah.... oh, come on, Web.” He grew serious again. “You could write this whole time and you left me guessing whether you were even there?”

He looked down at the paper. Webster wrote:

“Yes.”

“You spiteful piece of shit! You know how I’ve been feeling these past few weeks?! I thought I was going _meshugge_!”

The piece of paper was turned over. The pencil scratched.

“I was trying to be poetic.”

Frowning, Joe turned his head, and to his surprise, the vision no longer eluded him. He could now see the faintest of outlines of Webster’s figure. Something was definitely changing.

“Gee, thanks for the sentiment, Web,” he said sarcastically. “’Trying to be poetic’—hell.” His warm feelings towards Webster’s presence had made room for anger. The paper twitched on the table as the pencil moved.

“I didn’t want to scare you,” Joe read out loud. “You scared the hell outta me, anyway! Why’d you pop up in my cab all of a sudden? And what was with the damn poem?”

“The poem was a hint,” Webster wrote. “I wanted to say I was looking after you. I could you see you weren’t doing well, Joe. And after all we’d been through,—” Here he stopped. Joe read it back, and hesitated before replying.

“You’re an idiot,” he said, finally. The poem, after all, had reminded him of Webster, and of the fact that poetry, when not forced upon you by pretentious Harvard graduates, could actually be meaningful. After a pause, he said: “So what’s the deal here, Web? I mean, you’re dead.” He waited to let the words sink in. They sounded hollow in his small kitchen. “How come you’re even here? Why me? Other than,” his laconic tone returned, “me  _ apparently  _ being in need of help.”

In the living room, the clock struck six. 

“Fuck, I’m late for work. I gotta get.” Joe quickly gulped down his coffee, stood up from the table and pointed at the paper. “You stay here and write down everything that happened. I wanna read it when I get back.” He dashed from the room, not pausing to listen to the sound of the pencil scratching over the paper.

As he pulled the door shut behind him he felt no breeze in the stagnant air of the hallway, and when he’d got into his cab he sat quietly for a minute, trying to determine whether Webster was sitting beside him or not. He felt or saw nothing; he seemed to be alone. Relieved, he lowered the handbrake and began to drive. After a few blocks, however, regret swooped down upon him like a pigeon on a sidewalk sandwich. What if Webster had left again, through the window? This time forever? He cursed how Webster had made him feel like an idiot, dancing around him these past weeks, while he had felt genuine comfort in his company.

As he clocked in, several of the mechanics, who were drinking coffee, sauntered up to him.

“You look rough, Liebgott,” one of them observed. “Tough night?”

“Tough morning after,” Joe replied, and was greeted with chuckles. He walked over to the far end of the room, where a bucket with soapy water was perpetually kept.

“You get kicked out?”

Joe passed a wet rag over his windshield and dropped it back in the bucket. “Nah. Just seemed to wake up to a completely different person, is all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation: “Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge." - Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig)


End file.
